Military and civilian aircrafts, including fixed-wing aircrafts and rotary-wing aircrafts, may be exposed to threats by hostile forces, for example, terrorists or military forces. In the past three decades, numerous aircrafts have been attacked or hit by Infra-Red (IR) guided missiles, for example, man-portable shoulder-fired IR guided missiles or other man-portable air-defense (MANPAD) units.
Some aircrafts may be equipped with a Wide-body Integrated Platform Protection System (WIPPS), for example, a WIPPS Infra-Red Counter Measures (IRCM) suite. Such systems include, for example, imaging Ultra-Violet (UV) or Infra-Red (IR) electro-optic Missile Warning Sensors (MWS) and a pulse-Doppler radar MWS, for sensing (i.e., detecting and tracking) incoming threats.
Unfortunately, utilization of two different multi-sensor sub-systems renders the system heavy and prohibitively expensive, particularly for smaller aircraft.